The politics of indifference

by Yonmei

There is a stramash on livejournal at the moment, and although everyone is kicking very hard, I am not clear that the ball is getting anywhere.

If you are not interested or already know the details of yuletide, you can skip this paragraph. There is a rather splendid fannish storyfest, now in its fifth year, called Yuletide. It is, I think, the largest of its kind, and the size is what makes it so glorious. It runs in phases. First, two weeks during which you can nominate fandoms. They must be “rare fandoms”: the mods interpret “rare” fairly liberally, but you are not allowed to nominate a fandom like Harry Potter or Stargate or any of the Treks, for example. Second, two weeks in which you can sign up: you select an unlimited number of fandoms from the nomination list in which you are prepared to write a story (minimum length, 1000 words), and three fandoms (with one backup fandom) in which you would like a story to be written. When sign-ups close, the mods run a program which sorts everyone out – you are assigned someone who asked for a story in one of the fandoms you picked to write in, and someone is assigned your list of three fandoms and the details of the story you wanted. (You’re allowed to specify a pairing, which the writer must stick to, and you can put as much detail as you like in your story request, but the writer need not honor those details.) Then there are six weeks, more or less, in which to write the story, deadline roughly a week before Christmas. On the 25th of December, usually mid-afternoon UK time, the story archive goes live, with every story written that year anonymous, and people can read and comment and rec without knowing who wrote what. On 1st January, the names of the writers appear, and so does the list of story requests that were not granted: if anyone wants to write one, they can. There are more complications than this, but that’s pretty much how it works if you’re one of the fans who signs up for it. It is very much a livejournal storyfest: you don’t have to have a livejournal to sign up for it, but all the community activity happens on livejournal, all the notifications, deadlines, reminders, and the vast majority of the recs, are posted there.

This year, it happened that the first day of sign-ups for Yuletide coincided with the first day of a Jewish holiday which extended over the next two or three days.

A Jewish fan who missed the first five days of the sign-up period posted, on her livejournal, a mild complaint about this, adding that the nominations period had fallen on Yom Kippur and Sukkot, meaning she had had no time to post nominations of her own. In the discussion that followed, she pointed out that while the nominations/sign-ups are chosen pretty much to allow people two weeks to nominate, two weeks to sign-up, and still have six weeks or so to write the story, if it had turned out that a major convention had fallen in either the nominations or the sign-ups, the dates would most likely have been changed so as not to inconvenience the fans who were going. (A major American convention, but American went unsaid.) Then another fan, a friend of the mods, posted a flaming comment attacking the first fan, claiming that the first fan was publicly accusing the Yuletide mods of deliberately excluding Jews.

This was just over a week ago, but it was all on livejournal: I found out about it when a friend who double-posts on livejournal and greatestjournal (bless her) recced an interesting post on Common and hidden knowledge, which included links to two more posts, and I followed those links, and… after reading about 25 posts on this, I know I have not read even half of what’s been written, because pretty much all of the posts had long comment threads attached, which I mostly didn’t read. It is a thorough stramash.

(I do hope that it doesn’t lead the mods to feel that Enough is Enough and stop doing Yuletide: I love Yuletide, and have signed up for it every year since the first year. And it is a lot of work.)

No bigot ever thinks of themselves as a bigot: I think that’s always the case. A bigot believes that their opinions about the group they are bigoted against, are just factually true: that their beliefs are just common sense. (It’s like the belief held by some people who were brought up in certain parts of England or of the US that they speak without an accent (google on “accentless English”, and you will find it, though it is a self-evident absurdity).

But I think that much more usual than bigotry is indifference. And it’s indifference that I want to write about here.

Where I live, I belong to several majorities, and to several minorities. Among the majorities: I am white: English is my native language; I was brought up as a Christian; but, as an adult, I belong to no religion. Among the minorities: I am a lesbian; I am a vegetarian; I am a fan; the variety of Christianity I was brought up in is Quakerism. And, for most of my working life, I’ve worked in places where I was in a minority because of my gender – including where I work now.

I have experienced bigotry directed against the minorities to which I belong, but not often. The most common reaction of majority to minority is indifference, not hostility: in my experience, the first hostile reaction happens when the indifference is broken by a minority question that the majority cannot ignore.

Years ago, I worked in a department that had grown from five people to a dozen people quite quickly, and the manager, trying to weld us all into a team, used to organise monthly lunches for which attendance not-exactly-compulsory-but-you’d-better-have-a-good-excuse-if-you-don’t-go. Habitually, to save time, when the bill was presented, everyone used to kick in the same amount (it was usually £10) and that would cover the cost of the food/drink and a tip. I was the only vegetarian in the department. The kind of places we went to never had a particularly exciting menu, and my options as a vegetarian were usually a baked potato with cheese, a vegeburger with chips, or soup with bread. (Sometimes there was a vegetarian salad.) These were all cheap options. The cost of my meal was usually about £6-7, and paying £10 every time was irritating. I tried to suggest, several times, that I’d rather we all paid for what we bought; to this, most people responded with “Oh it evens out in the long run”. I pointed out, more than once, that it didn’t even out for me, because the only meals available to me were always less than £10: to which someone always rejoined “Oh, there’s nothing to stop you ordering what you like”. When I finally lost my temper about the situation, and got hauled up before my manager and rebuked for lacking team spirit and trying to spoil other people’s team spirit/enjoyment of pleasant lunches together, it wasn’t because I thought that my colleagues were being hostile towards me because I’m vegetarian: it was because I had been confronted with their complete indifference to the situation that my being vegetarian put me in, at far too many departmental lunches at which I was expected not only not to mind part-paying for other people’s meals as well as my own, but not to irritate other people by talking about it.

One aspect of privilege is that you do not have to be aware of being privileged. If something is set up to convenience members of a privileged group, members of the group privileged will often react with anger and hostility to any reminder that the way things have been set up is not “just how things are”: that arrangements have been purposefully made to convenience members of the privileged group, with – at best – complete indifference as to how this may inconvenience people outside the privileged group. It should be fairly obvious why this is: if this is “just how things are” then they will not change: everything will always go on as it now is. If you acknowledge that “how things are” is a purposeful arrangement made to convenience some people and inconveniencing others, the question necessarily arises: why are some people deserving of convenience, while others are not?

I don’t think of myself as a Christian very often: I think of myself as an atheist with a Quaker background. But of course I am culturally Christian, and live in a country where most of the official holidays are Christian in origin. I get Christmas Day and Boxing Day off work. It’s part of the charm of the Yuletide storyfest for me that I am giving a story to someone for Christmas, and it’s become part of the pleasure of Christmas Day to be able to open up the Yuletide archive in the evening and read a story someone wrote for me (and look for the first recs appearing on livejournal, and hope to hear that the person for whom I wrote a story enjoyed it). It hadn’t occurred to me even once to think about how Muslim or Jewish fans might feel about it. I am fairly sure it would never have occurred to me, if I were running a storyfest like Yuletide, to look up the dates of major Jewish or Muslim holidays in October and schedule nomination and sign-up dates so that they didn’t clash. (And as I write this, I wonder if I’m excluding Hindu or Sikh fans – though all the posts/comments I’ve read about this have been from fans who belong, culturally and/or religiously, to one of the Abrahamic religions.) I think it would occur to me now, but I also think it’s like offering a friendly piece of chocolate to a Muslim during Ramadan: it’s the kind of thing you do on impulse without thinking, and the best you can do is say “”Sorry, I didn’t realise”.

I hate “Sorry if” apologies with a hot flaring passion. But “Sorry, I didn’t realise” is a different kind of apology.

“Sorry if you were offended” refuses to acknowledge the reality of that person’s offense: it’s a conditional apology, and an insult: “If you can convince me you were really offended – and I can’t believe you really are – then I’ll apologise. But I’m not apologising unless you first convince me that you were offended – and your simple word that you were offended is not enough, I want more.”

“Sorry, I didn’t realise” is a mildly defensive apology (“I didn’t realise that what I was doing or saying was offensive to you, it was innocent in intent”) but it is a true apology: it acknowledges the offense exists, while claiming that the offender had no reason to know that they were being offensive. (“Sorry, I didn’t think,” is a stronger variant of this.)

It has to be said: I don’t believe the organisers of Yuletide owe participating Jewish fans anything stronger than a “Sorry, we didn’t realise” – if that: the sign-up periods last a fortnight so that even if something that eats up a week is happening during it, you can still sign up. And because the archive of stories closes down (links to individual stories still work, but you can’t search for a story) the mods have good reason not to want to make sign-ups start earlier, and can’t very well make them start later – you have to give people a reasonable amount of time to consider their assigned story and to write it. I suspect (despite the earlier comment I mentioned) that even if a major American con had fallen on the first weekend of sign-ups, the date still would not have been changed – though the organisers might have mentioned it in the livejournal yuletide community. And further, I don’t believe the author of the original post, protesting how Yuletide dates clashed with Jewish holiday dates, thought that they did: she was protesting their indifference, not their bigotry. Indifference doesn’t result from hostility: it derives from being so comfortably in the majority that you never have to think that a minority have different needs. Hostility enters when the majority find themselves questioned, as of right, by the minority.

But what has happened since – not from the Yuletide organisers, who have, quite reasonably, said nothing – has been a nasty and distinctly anti-Semitic reaction from a range of fans, some anonymous, some not. The hostile reaction of representatives of a majority who don’t like being questioned.

Nothing in the original post truly justified any angry response. But a lot of ugly things have been said since. The person who flamed the original poster wrote an entry a week after protesting that she didn’t like being accused of anti-Semitism when she was just defending her friends: there didn’t seem to be any awareness that attacking someone who is complaining of indifference is the first opening of hostilities, not the second. And, FWIW, I don’t think that first flamer was being anti-Semitic: I think she was just reacting like any member of a comfortable majority. (She’d probably have flamed me just as hard for complaining that Yuletide is set up to exclude people not on livejournal from the Yuletide community, or any Brit for complaining that the archive opens mid-afternoon on Christmas Day.)

- More blogging by Yonmei at http://yonmei.insanejournal.com

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